After Valve said no to Portal 64, the dev is making a new Nintendo 64 game that sounds a lot like the co-op cult classic that put the Helldivers devs on the map
May. 12, 2024Before there was managed democracy, there was Magicka
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Earlier this year,Valve asked James Lambert, the developer behind Portal 64, to stop work on the fan game. Instead, he’s now making a brand-new Nintendo 64 game that seems to take a page from the cult classic co-op title that launched Helldivers developer Arrowhead Game Studios.
Valve’s issue with Portal 64 stemmed from the fact that it used proprietary Nintendo development libraries, which had leaked ages ago but were never officially made public. Lambert has since moved over to open source alternatives, as he explains in the video below, but Valve seemed uncomfortable with the notion of porting Portal 64 because it wouldn’t have a good way of tracking the project - and changing the foundation of the game would be a ton of extra work anyway.
Instead, Lambert is building a new N64 game that looks like a sort of action platformer. “The core concept of the game is that you are a wizard,” he explains. “You learn various runes, and these runes can be combined together to create interesting spells. Everything from fireball to even jumping or flying are all done by combining spell symbols in the right way to get the right result.”
Portal 64 certainly showed that Lambert can build a technically impressive N64 title, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing whatever form this magic game ends up taking.
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